1. Field
The present invention relates to a refrigerator and a control method thereof, and, more particularly, to a refrigerator and a control method thereof, wherein operation of an icemaker can be controlled according to time or function.
2. Description of the Related Art
In general, a refrigerator is an apparatus wherein cold air produced via a refrigeration cycle of a refrigerant is fed into food storage compartments, such as a freezing compartment and a refrigerating compartment, to kept food fresh for a long time. With a recent tendency of improving convenience of use and enhancing the quality of products, a refrigerator having an icemaker, which automatically freezes water into ice cubes within the refrigerator, has been introduced.
A conventional icemaker includes an ice-making container in which water is received and is frozen into ice cubes, and a storage container in which the frozen ice cubes are stored. If water is supplied into the ice-making container, the icemaker implements an ice-making operation in which the water is frozen into ice cubes using cold air, and after completion of the ice-making operation, the icemaker implements an ice-separating operation in which the ice-making container is rotated to transfer the frozen ice cubes into the storage container. With the ice-making and ice-separating operations, providing a user with the ice cubes is accomplished.
The ice-making and ice-separating operations of the icemaker are successively implemented until the storage container is filled with an appropriate amount of ice cubes. During implementation of the ice-separating operation, however, transferring the ice cubes into the storage container causes noise.
Another problem of the conventional icemaker is that the icemaker successively implements the ice-making and ice-separating operations regardless of time of day if a deficiency of ice cubes is judged. When the ice-separating operation is implemented at night, a user experiences discomfort and in the worst case, the user's sleep is disturbed. Therefore, conventionally, there has been used a method to control operation of an icemaker using short-cut keys or function keys, which are provided at a front panel of a door to allow a user to select On/Off of the icemaker. However, this conventional method is undesirable in view of convenience of use for eliminating user discomfort and limiting unnecessary operation of the icemaker.